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Mohali NABI gets speed breeding crop facility at
Union minister of science and technology Jitendra Singh said speed breeding crop facility at NABI, Mohali, will cater to all states across India and will be particularly useful for the North Indian states
Union minister of science and technology Jitendra Singh on Monday inaugurated a National Speed Breeding Crop Facility at the National Agri-Food Biotechnology Institute (NABI) in Mohali.
Speaking on the occasion, Jitendra Singh said, “The initiative is in line with Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi’s priority of doubling the farmer income, ensuring their economic empowerment and promoting Agri-StartUps. Farmers will now have the opportunity to improve their crop quality as well as quantity.”
The minister added that the biotechnology speedy seeds facility will cater to all states across India and will be particularly useful for the North Indian States like Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana and the UT of Jammu and Kashmir.
“The facility will augment transformational changes in crop improvement programmes by accelerating development of advanced crop varieties that can sustain climate change and contribute to the food and nutritional demand of the population with implementation of speed breeding cropping methods,” Singh said.
He highlighted that the institute’s department has developed a technology on climate-resistant crops, by harnessing these technologies the farmers will not be restrained to cultivate a crop in a particular season rather they will have the liberty to practise farming irrespective of climate conduciveness.
NABI executive director Ashwani Pareek said the crop facility will be used to develop new wheat, rice, soybean, pea, tomato, varieties among other by using a precisely controlled environment (light, humidity, temperature) to achieve more than four generations of a crop per year.
Khudian lays foundation stone for bio fertilizer lab
Punjab agriculture and farmers’ welfare minister Gurmeet Singh Khudian, meanwhile, laid the foundation stone of the bio-fertiliser testing laboratory at Kheti Bhawan, Phase-6.
The laboratory, according to the officials, will be built at a cost of about ₹2.5 crore, while a total three bio-fertiliser testing laboratories will be established in the state, the minister said.
The construction of the first laboratory at Gurdaspur has already been completed, while another is to come up at Bathinda.
“Earlier, many types of spurious pesticides and fertilisers were sold in the name of Bio-fertilizer and when samples were analysed, they could not pass the benchmark test. Moreover, these samples were sent to laboratories in other states which caused delay in action. But now the Punjab government has decided to set up such laboratories in the state. The farmers will get high quality bio-fertilisers and will get a massive boost in promoting poison-free farming,” Khudian said.
